A Historical Guidebook to Old Columbus. Bob Hunter
of the Crotti-Buckles building. Montaldo’s, an upscale ladies fashion store, occupied this spot in that building; the company declared bankruptcy in 1995. The PNC bank building stands there today.
5. Northeast corner of Broad and Fourth Streets—Wesley Chapel, also called Central Methodist Church, stood here from 1885 to 1935. Church officials decided to build here after the original Wesley Chapel, which was located on the west side of High Street between Gay and Long Streets, was destroyed by fire on May 13, 1883. The congregation consisted of over seven hundred members at the time. In 1930, the church made tentative plans to build a Methodist temple on the site, but the temple was never built. In 1935, the church decided to raze the old church, anyway. The site was a parking lot for years until the construction of the thirty-four-ffloor Borden Building in 1973.
6. Southeast corner of Broad and Fourth Streets—The stately mansion of pressed brick that today serves as the Columbus Club was built in the 1860s for financier and railroad contractor Benjamin E. Smith. Smith’s dream was to create a rival amusement park to Coney Island in New York. He selected Rockaway Beach as his location and went to work, eventually losing most of his fortune in the process. When Smith moved to New York in 1883, the house was for rent; newly elected governor George Hoadly moved in when he took office the next year. It continued as the “governor’s mansion” when Joseph Foraker succeeded Hoadly. In the meantime, Smith was declared insane and committed to an asylum in 1885. The Columbus Club, founded by seventy-five or more men in a room on the first ffloor of City Hall in December 1886, bought his former home in 1887. The then all-male club began a custom of hosting banquets in honor of governors; all but a few have been entertained there and have been given honorary memberships. Since the time
of Grover Cleveland, many presidents have been entertained there, including Theodore Roosevelt. Warren G. Harding and William Howard Taft were members for many years. During the 1920 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Harding and Democratic candidate James M. Cox had dinner in the club on the same evening. Numerous military heroes have also been honored there, including Admiral George Dewey shortly after his victory at Manila Bay.
7. Northeast corner of Broad and Young Streets—William G. Deshler built a simple, two-story house here in 1848 on a lot that was given to him by his father, David, who was laying out a subdivision with William S. Sullivant in the area bounded by Fourth, Fifth, Broad, and Long Streets William Deshler, then twenty-one, was given the lot—the address was 198 East Broad—for doing such a good job of promoting and selling the lots. When this home was built, the brick sidewalk ended at their gate. The only house beyond it on Broad was the Greek Revival mansion of Alfred Kelley, at what today would be 282 East Broad. William’s son, John, who later built the Deshler Hotel on the site of the family’s Broad and High home site, was born in this house in 1852. In 1859, a now-wealthy William bought the lot at the northwest corner of Broad and Third and built a much larger house, and in 1866, the land to the east of this house at Fifth and Broad was purchased for a Catholic church. When the Diocese of Columbus was created under Bishop Sylvester Rosecrans, it was redesigned as a cathedral and consecrated in 1878. In 1886, Bishop Watterson bought the house from then-owner William B. Brooks and made it the Episcopal residence. It served as the home for Bishops Moeller, Hartley, and Ready. In 1948, it was torn down and the present Chancery-Cathedral Rectory was built. William Deshler’s yard remains between the rectory and the cathedral.
8. 250 East Broad Street—Columbus Lodge of Elks No. 37 dedicated an impressive three-story lodge building in 1915, behind the spot currently occupied by the Midland Mutual office tower. The lodge had over two thousand members at the time. As the Elks numbers dwindled, the lodge was eventually forced to give up its extensive home; in 1946, Midland Mutual remodeled the building and moved its offices there. The insurance company continued to grow and eventually needed an even larger building, and in 1968 plans were announced for the office building on the front part of the lot. The old lodge building was torn down in 1970, and a landscaped plaza that sits between the office tower and a parking garage has taken its place.
9. 257 East Broad Street—In the late 1960s, Dave Thomas, a local businessman who had turned around a struggling four-store Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise during the mid-1950s, regularly exercised at the Columbus Athletic Club with his friend, Len Immke, a downtown Buick dealer. They often discussed Thomas’s dream of opening a hamburger restaurant. On November 15, 1969, he opened the first Wendy’s in the west end of a building that had housed Tommy Henrich’s Steak House; the steakhouse had been co-owned by the former New York Yankees star. Immke provided the space for his friend’s new restaurant. Immke had purchased it and had been using part of it to prep new Buicks for his showroom across the street. (The site had once also been occupied by Bill Kay Oldsmobile.) Within a year, Thomas opened his second restaurant in Columbus and Wendy’s was on its way; as of March 2011, the chain had over 6,500 locations, making it the world’s third largest hamburger fast food chain, behind McDonald’s and Burger King. Thomas named the restaurant after his fourth child, Melinda Lou “Wendy” Thomas. Photographs of her and other Wendy’s memorabilia were on display in this building until the restaurant closed on March 2, 2007, because of declining sales. The building was subsequently renovated to house the Catholic Foundation, and all traces of the original Wendy’s have been erased. In 1921, State Auto Mutual Insurance Company’s first office opened on this site in a two-story house that had been owned by Henry Plimpton; the company remained there until 1925. The Tivoli nightclub opened here in 1938.
10. 269 East Broad Street—Baseball Hall of Famer Larry MacPhail ran Ohio Motors, a Willys-Knight and Overland Whippet dealer, here in the mid- to late 1920s. He became president of the Medical Science Building Company in 1929, before he purchased an interest in the Columbus Red Birds, the St. Louis Cardinals minor league affiliate.
11. 280 East Broad Street—This building was designed by Frank L. Packard and opened as Memorial Hall in 1905. For a while, it held the second-largest auditorium in the United States; only New York’s Madison Square Garden was larger. The main room, 140 by 155 feet, seated five thousand. The stage measured 81 by 37 feet. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, Will Rogers, Warren G. Harding, Billy Sunday, Sarah Bernhardt, Charles Evans Hughes, and Enrico Caruso are among the notables who appeared here. The building hosted concerts, graduation ceremonies, political rallies, auto shows, religious revivals, home shows, and nearly every other imaginable event for almost sixty years. By the 1950s, the building had fallen into disrepair, and no consensus could be reached on what to do about it. In 1962, county commissioners voted to restore and remodel the building into a museum, which became the Center of Science and Industry in 1964. When COSI moved to its current location at 333 West Broad Street in 1999, the façade was removed and the building returned to its original appearance.